Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Unable to deal with Chrome Extension Team, Kozmos is shutting down

kodfabrik.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 530 posts

Re: Unable to deal with Chrome Extension Team, Kozmos is shutting down

#41

Post by black_puppydog »

deadwing0 wrote: post #19

Is it possible that Google writes code to automate the moderation (for lack of better word) of the extensions in the Chrome Store because they are trying to avoid paying hundreds of people to do it manually? I know it's easy to say "Google doesn't care about you," and generally it as a company may not care, but they also are not in the business of putting us out of business. It feels like to me that they have just be…

> they also are not in the business of putting us out of business

Actually, the way they've expanded their range of products I'd wager they've put quite a few people out of business. It's especially bad if your business happens to not be one of the ones they acquihire, but one of their competitors, as evidenced by a handful of antitrust lawsuits.

Re: Unable to deal with Chrome Extension Team, Kozmos is shutting down

#42

Post by deadwing0 »

city41 wrote: post #35
deadwing0 wrote: post #19

Is it possible that Google writes code to automate the moderation (for lack of better word) of the extensions in the Chrome Store because they are trying to avoid paying hundreds of people to do it manually? I know it's easy to say "Google doesn't care about you," and generally it as a company may not care, but they also are not in the business of putting us out of business. It feels like to me that they have just be…

I can’t see how a healthy browser extension ecosystem would help Google. Without Google getting any real value out of it, it makes total sense they do a poor job managing it.

I somewhat agree, yet wouldn't a healthy extension ecosystem (excellent term, btw) attract more users to Chrome and in turn keep users more entwined in the larger Google ecosystem? I guess there is a cost/benefit analysis done. They put just enough effort into it to get the return or results they want. The little guys like OP (who arguably make the best content because it's open source and not full of trackers or other junk) just get stepped on along the way.

Re: Unable to deal with Chrome Extension Team, Kozmos is shutting down

#43

Post by amirathi »

deadwing0 wrote: post #19

Is it possible that Google writes code to automate the moderation (for lack of better word) of the extensions in the Chrome Store because they are trying to avoid paying hundreds of people to do it manually? I know it's easy to say "Google doesn't care about you," and generally it as a company may not care, but they also are not in the business of putting us out of business. It feels like to me that they have just be…

It's clear that Google don't want to hire humans and run customer support centers. According to reports, this has bit them in GCP adoption as well.

That's fine but at least have a human review before taking disastrous actions like taking down extensions, lockdown Gmail accounts. If you can't afford even that at least have an appeal process where human would review the case. If you can't make the economics work even for that maybe just don't run the app store.

Re: Unable to deal with Chrome Extension Team, Kozmos is shutting down

#44

Post by carapace »

I'm keeping an eye on cookiengineer's "Stealth" proxy ( https://github.com/cookiengineer/stealth ). It reminds me of the old (and still kickin') Proxomitron ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxomitron )

If you MITM your own browser you can do whatever you want without an extension (that's almost a hostage to browser makers.)

Re: Unable to deal with Chrome Extension Team, Kozmos is shutting down

#47

Post by microcolonel »

omnifischer wrote: post #5

It is disgusting that no one from media asks Sundar Pichai touch questions like: 1. Non human (AI) usage for termination google accounts. 2. No repeal process At least some employee from Google here in hn must do things and understand mentality of other people. It increasingly looks like - well... we employees live in bubble but if you are unlucky then you are screwed. Do not ask us? What kind of programmers wrote su…

The odd thing is that they can't even make a cost argument for this. If they charged a cost recovery fee for human redress of these sorts of issues, it would not cost them anything, and that's assuming they don't lose money from improper automated enforcement, which they almost certainly do.

It's pure incompetence.

Re: Unable to deal with Chrome Extension Team, Kozmos is shutting down

#48

Post by microcolonel »

monadic2 wrote: post #18
lowiqengineer wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s pretty apparent that they think people who don’t work for google are vastly inferior human beings. It honestly runs counter to their “social justice” facade.

I really think this is unreasonable. Even at google there are different subcultures, including many with an anti-corporate streak. Furthermore I’m not going to blame an employee for not sticking out their neck for client businesses who also don’t give a shit about them. This isn’t a problem of individual providence. Google needs a damn union just to get some reason in the building.

> Google needs a damn union just to get some reason in the building.

The problem is not mainly with how Google treats their employees (though there's definitely something wrong there), but with how they treat their customers.

Re: Unable to deal with Chrome Extension Team, Kozmos is shutting down

#49

Post by fortran77 »

monadic2 wrote: post #18
lowiqengineer wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s pretty apparent that they think people who don’t work for google are vastly inferior human beings. It honestly runs counter to their “social justice” facade.

I really think this is unreasonable. Even at google there are different subcultures, including many with an anti-corporate streak. Furthermore I’m not going to blame an employee for not sticking out their neck for client businesses who also don’t give a shit about them. This isn’t a problem of individual providence. Google needs a damn union just to get some reason in the building.

Nobody who get a Google paycheck has a sincere "anti-corporate" streak.

Re: Unable to deal with Chrome Extension Team, Kozmos is shutting down

#50

Post by calpaterson »

kyleee wrote: post #34
calpaterson wrote: post #29

I have a side-project that is partially a browser extension. I use a single codebase for both Firefox and Chrome. Even with my trivial side-project and a grand total of two releases so far, Google ar itrarily rejected one release for being "spammy" when there was literally a 5 line diff between it and the previous release. Thankfully just finding the depreciated dashboard and uploading an icon (the "new dashboard" do…

Your best course of action is to drop chrome support, and make your extension as good as possible and make a point of marketing that it's firefox only. Most won't do it due to worrying about market share, but alas IMO it's the best option available

I use Firefox personally and originally made the thing for myself. I added Chrome support because Chrome is much more popular (not far from ten times more popular these days :() and people I would like to use this, eg friends and family, mostly use Chrome.

I couldn't ask them to switch browsers for my little side project. I have to co-operate with Google's bureaucracy. For what it's worth, so far it seems like Mozilla is not exactly streets ahead, but at least they didn't charge me and they seem to be fairer and more helpful to extension developers (they have a "self-distribution" mode with relaxed oversight I used while in private alpha, and their tools and docs are better).

Post reply on HN